


Seconds of Silence

by Flameysaur



Category: Dragon Age II
Genre: F/M, Implied/Referenced Rape/Non-con, One Shot, Snapshots, Stream of Consciousness
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-03-21
Updated: 2016-03-21
Packaged: 2018-05-28 05:56:59
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,197
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6317416
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Flameysaur/pseuds/Flameysaur
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Fenris has a complicated relationship with everyone, silence isn't any different.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Seconds of Silence

He is Leto and silence is a stolen thing. A boy, brown as a berry with black hair cut long to help hide the ears, runs through the endless garden of a man he only knows as Master. His ears, the hated things that make him what he is, twitch with echos of so much noise. The yells of the staff, clanging of pots in the kitchen, clash of swords of the guards, a screech of a punished slave recieving their twelve lashes, and his sister screaming after him,

“Slaves aren’t allowed in the gardens!”

But Leto doesn’t care. He is shadows and sleekness, and the clang of guard armor is booming in young elf ears. Thickly grown hedges for a maze can’t stop him as he wiggles through weak spots and climbs up stone walls. It takes a long time to find silence on his master’s estate, but he is a master thief, and even this most protected jewel he can take.

He sits in the shadows, brown and black, rubbing smooth skin and relishing the quiet of nothing. He is Leto here, not a slave, and not a burden. He images himself an even greater thief who plucks the three finest jewels from his master’s estate: a red-haired elven woman and her two children. Leto can only imagine the stealing, because there’s nothing in his mind for the word “freedom.”

* * *

He is Danarius’ little wolf, said with oozing ownership. His skin hurts and his hair hangs white in front of his eyes before he pulls it back in the morning. Hours spent indoors at his master’s side, body hunched for battle, pales his skin. There’s a sword on his back, almost as tall as he and over half as heavy. His master loves the looks people give it, wide eyed and concerned. He also loves the muscles, tightly corded and straining when wielding the weapon, in his wolf’s arms.

Silence is a foreign treat, something imported and meant to be savored as you won’t get it again quickly. There’s the clashing yells of the market, droning buzzing of meetings between his master and the others, his sword clanging against another slave during practice, and the taunts, endless taunts, as magisters pit against magisters for blood and profit.

He’s sent on an errand, but his master is sleepy eyed and smirking at a shivering messenger from a dear friend and the little wolf knows that means to linger. He stops, all at once, in a forgotten hallway. His body slumps forward and a hot forehead presses against cool stone. He is shadow and sleekness, but he is not. Even in the darken hallway, scraps of light catch on the lyrium in his skin, in his hair. He is bound death and bright threat and he imagines nothing at all in this silence.

He rises after a minute, unable to escape Danarius even in his mind, and runs twice as fast to complete his errand. When he returns, the messenger has a poisoned dagger to Danarius’ throat, ready to slice it open. Fenris thrusts his sword through the assassin’s chest without hesitation. He gets twelve lashes for being late and it takes him just as many years to realize he never had to help at all.

* * *

Sheron happens and the little wolf becomes Fenris, with bloody hands and running feet. His hair is hacked off at places and still catches in the light. He tries to rub mud over his skin to hide the markings and seeks sanctuary in shadows and pushes, but the lyrium always shows. Magic always shows.

Silence becomes a threat, a signal he is alone and ready to be caught. It’s a blanket he can’t enjoy the warmth because it’s suffocating him. He sticks to villages and cities, places where even an elf like him can get lost. He dives into allienages and the elven slums of cities, where noise is a constant companion.

He is in one, an alienage to a city whose name he couldn’t read, when he sees a young boy rubbing his ears and crying to his sister. He’s rubbing his ears, trying to block out noise and the older girl tries to calm him. Absently, Fenris copies the motion and almost remembers. It sits at the edge of his mind like a phrase you can almost say. Shadows and sleekness. The girl leads her brother away, into an alleyway and Fenris doesn’t follow.

Silence is the only free luxury. He will not steal it from children.

* * *

Fenris meets Hawke, and Hawke is never quiet. He does not like the human, with her easy magic and easier smiles. She collects people like a magister, taking great joy in gathering a ragtag group of which she covets him to join. She is no different from Danarius, eyes running over his skin in greedy desire. Where she goes, noise follows, bright laughs, assassin attacks ending a visit to the beach, chattering conversation in a crowded pub, expressive hand motions that manage to knock over a thunderstorm of weapons, a chance meeting with a dwarf that leads to battling Tal-Vashoth. Hawke doesn’t know the meaning of stealth, too much a mage, fire bright and lighting loud.

Then she and her brother go into the Deep Roads together, and only one returns. The money rolls in then, so fast and loud that Hawke is buried under it all. It almost doesn’t surprise Fenris when he finds her in an alleyway, struggling to climb up the two buildings to reach a roof. Almost.

“What are you doing, Hawke?”

“Too noise.” Her words slur. She’s drunk, and loud with it, but Fenris can hear the silence under it. The silence of grief and loss and an oldest sibling with no siblings left. “I want to go up.”

“It’s better to go down.” The undercity had thousands of dead ends and crevices where even the poor could find silence.

“No wind.” She points to the sky and Fenris sighs. It hurts to touch, hurts more to haul a human three inches taller than him up on his shoulders, but she laughs in drunken delight when she reaches the roof of the nearest building. She pulls herself up with unmage-like strength. Then turns and leans too far over to offer him a hand.

He should walk on. He got her her wind and her silence and he had nothing to do with this mage. But his hand ends up in hers and with some lyrium boost, and a quick jump off the opposite wall, she gets him up, laughing as he lands bodily on her. He scrambles up, bare toes scraping against sun warmed tile, but she stays laying down, staring up at the sky.

It’s not any quieter here, on this Lowtown roof with the smell of rotten fish rolling in from the docks, and the streetwalkers down below hawking their wares. Hawke sighs however, and her eyes flutter close.

“That’s better.”

“It’s hardly any quieter here.”

She laughs, because of course she does.

“I don’t have elf ears, twitching at every spare sound.”

Fenris frowns, ears tucking down under his hair. Danarius used to praise his hearing, if he caught a spy or assassin and Fenris wonders if that’s why he was chosen. For his elf ears. Surely there were better warriors than a scrawny elf.

“I’m sorry. Did that bother you?” Hawke sits all the way up, concern gleaming in her eyes.

Fenris shrugs, sword scraping on the roof. “Danarius prized my good hearing. Said it saved his life half a dozen times over.” Bitterness seeps into his words, shoulders bunching together. “Says that redeems at least half the flea bitten race.”

“Fenris.” Somehow, Hawke is right at his side. Her hand lands on his, fingers teasing the tips of his. His skin aches, and yet the warmth seeps in deeper than the pain. “You being an elf isn’t even in the top ten things I like about you.”

Fenris pulls his hand away at that. He skitters back on the roof and yet a nervous laugh escapes his throat. It sounds echoing and wrong in his ears, like back at the mansion. _What a waste of a perfectly handsome elf_. This isn’t Danarius, with his sleepy eyes and crooked finger. Hawke stays where she was, a smile in her lips but wide eyes dark still. Fenris climbs to his feet.

“Thank you, Hawke.” He manages, then drops down the opposite side of the roof. Hawke’s laugh follows him as he all but runs away, cheeks flaming.

And yet the noise does not bother him, husky and warm.

* * *

For one night, Fenris pretends to be whole and destroys himself in the process. Memories flicker like the dying flames in a grate, disappearing before they can be seen. One by one by one. Hawke tries to make it better, with her touches and her smiles. She wants him back in the bed, at her side, below her feet, leash in hand.

He says no as much to escape her painful hold as to prove he’s allowed the word. Hightown is silent at night, with the roaming gangs not so stupid as to attack him. He stops, panting for breath, in the middle of the square before his home. The air is crisp with the upcoming winter and small clouds form before his lips. He can still feel her fingers, phantom pockets of warm, running over his skin.

Fenris looks at his arms and sees bruises around his lyrium. He remembers her holding him so tight like she’s afraid he’ll disappear again. Like she cares if he leaves. She groaned his name, panting it in desperate ecstasy. Her voice deepened when aroused, sounding almost manish, almost Danarius, as she got closer to her peak. Fenris shudders and raced the last steps home.

Water is cold in the mansion, with no two dozen servants to carry it from the kitchen to a fire to a tub in the master’s bathing room. But it runs and Fenris scrubs the freezing water over his skin until there was nothing but himself left. No touch of her, no smell of them, nothing but him and his bruises. The drops of his bathing echo in the kitchen, loud, accusatory drops.

No one else would have run away. Hawke knew so many people, all who’d be so pleased to be with her and still she chose him. And he ran. All he did was run. City to city. Master to master. Anger explodes in his blood like a flash fire. He takes his sword and smashes it into the wood island in the kitchen. Metal thuds against oak, dusty pans clang together, clay pots crash against stone. For as long as Fenris can, he fills his ears with noise, so nothing else can get in.

But when the destruction ends, all that remains is silence.

Hawke doesn’t come for him for two weeks.

* * *

Silence isn’t a stolen thing anymore. If anything, he has too much. He has the silence when Hawke says nothing when once she would have said something. He has the awkward pause as no one knows where to sit at the Hanged Man because Hawke always sat by Fenris. He has the hesitation in Hawke’s voice before she says his name, as if that was something he could ever deny her. He has that first long pause, when she came to him and look at his wrist and hip then his eyes. He has that moment that repeats again and again, when she searches his eyes begging for an answer.

“What are we?” She hasn’t asked a thousand times. And every time she doesn’t, he has that too.

But Hawke is noise, and so he has that as well. Every time Anders talks louder to drown out their silence, trying to replace it with his noise. Every loud commandment from Varric to pick out seats so he ends up next to Hawke and Fenris is across. Every off color joke from Isabela to ease the tension. Every not so innocent question from Merrill as she needles him until he bleeds.

“Even you can be happy once in awhile.”

He has the screaming silence of when the Arishok challenges Hawke to battle for the fate of Kirkwall. He has the silent scream of when she ends up on his blade, bobbed up and down like a broken doll. He has all the time between when Anders drags her back to this world kicking and screaming and when Hawke actually breathes again. He has that second when he’s able to forget every single reason why they’re wrong for each other and he holds her in his arms and it almost doesn’t hurt at all.

He has the years that pass between that day and the beginning of the end, which in memory are silent and still, like snapshots rather than real passing of time.

He has her smile, more fragile than before but just as bright. He has it aimed at him, despite everything, when she shows up at his door and breaks the silence.

“I have a job for us.”


End file.
